


When Pandora Met Occam

by remembertowrite



Series: When Pandora Met Occam [2]
Category: The Black Tapes Podcast
Genre: Angst, F/M, Friends With Benefits, Morning After, Mutual Pining, Spoilers through 201
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-05
Updated: 2016-02-05
Packaged: 2018-05-18 08:02:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,769
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5909632
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/remembertowrite/pseuds/remembertowrite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>Whenever possible, substitute constructions out of known entities for inferences to unknown entities.</em>
</p><p>A confused Alex and an apprehensive Strand get tangled up in the logic of love (or lack thereof).</p><p>The second in a series, but works as a self-contained story.</p>
            </blockquote>





	When Pandora Met Occam

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on [Tumblr](http://remembertowrite.tumblr.com/post/138424183873/when-pandora-met-occam) on 1/31/16

To: Alex Reagan, sent 8/17/15, 9:32pm

Whenever possible, substitute constructions out of known entities for inferences to unknown entities.

From: Alex Reagan, received 8/17/15, 10:06pm

What?

To: Alex Reagan, sent 8/17/15, 10:08pm

Occam’s Razor.

From: Alex Reagan, received 8/17/15, 10:14pm

You _would_ text me that.

###

Her iPhone screams on the nightstand. The device’s insistent buzzing causes it to skate off the edge, and its ungraceful landing shatters the morning quietude with violent abandon. Her eyes rocket open to take in the crime scene on the floor: The old phone has hemorrhaged little flecks of glass; its screen blinks on and off like a failing heart monitor.

“Shit,” she hisses, and follows the phone onto the floor with a protestant roll. She falls onto her stomach, and the impact dazes her a little. Lying there, she feels the floor-length curtains whisper prayers against her skin, propelled forward by the hymnic hum of the heater. She savors the warmth on this February morning, but a voice in her head gripes about the certain ballooning of this month’s bill.

She hears another tell-tale crunch of a glass phone screen as she rolls onto her back and takes in her surroundings. The place is awash with soft white coloring and clean aesthetics that lack the lived-in feel of her apartment. This bedroom is decidedly not her own.

The second issuance of “shit” from her mouth this morning emerges more impassioned when the head-splitting hangover strikes her. Grabbing the edge of the nightstand, she claws her way out of her grave and recoils from her epitaph, the too-familiar handwriting scrawled over a post-it note on the nightstand: _Panel session today ends at 1:30. Let me know if you’re free later. –R.S._

She couples her third utterance of “shit” with “ _holy_ ,” bringing the curse into the realm of art, a two-syllable love poem for the ages. She collapses onto the bed, her naked body fading into the pall of death. The simplest explanation is probably the right conclusion to draw, but she’s not ready to put it into words. She self-consciously shrouds herself with sheets, cowering from the judging stares of walls. Not one to back down, she spits out that it’s not any of their business.

Waking up in a hotel room and fighting with the walls. _Excellent, Alex_.

Her phone screams in agony again, and she buries her face in a pillow. An errant voice in her head teases that at least this time it isn’t demons.

Twenty minutes later, after she’s tamed her hair and smoothed down her wrinkled blouse the best she can and hidden it under her pea coat, she high-tails it out of Strand’s hotel room. Her dying phone vibrates in a struggle for a return to the status quo as her steadfast (but sometimes infuriating) right-hand man. She thumbs the cracked screen with pity, already knowing the device won’t work for her anymore.

At the AT&T store she chokes down a sense of calm and stands vigil at her phone’s deathbed. The iPhone blips slower and slower until it flatlines, and the sales associate tells her it’s over. She hasn’t talked to anyone yet today. Maybe it was fortuitous luck that her phone died. She evens her breathing, reaching a meditative state while the sales associate drawls on about the details of device upgrades.

Memories ghost around the edges of her consciousness: The nasally laugh of a U. Washington professor as he discussed the finer points of some psychological phenomenon that engrossed Strand. The exhale of a bored sigh that fluttered her bangs, and the musical swish of white wine in her glass. Strand’s glower as she later bemoaned the didacticism of his fellow conference-goers, a shit-eating grin smeared across her face.

Then, teleported to a different room (or, more realistically, after several hours she doesn’t recall; even in her mind, Strand takes exception to hyperbole): The tensing of his forearm as she tugged on his sleeve, a visceral reaction to the sudden intimacy. His hand pressed onto the wall over her right shoulder, his height dwarfing her, glasses etched in bas-relief against the shadow of his face. The lurch of confusion as he unlocked the Pandora’s Box of their relationship.

Most of all she recalls the base emotional response, a fight or flight instinct so deep-seated that her adrenaline spikes at the mere remembrance of the night before. Electricity crackles under her skin. It paralyzes her.

The sales associate interprets her silence as concurrence. A fresh two-year contract and several hundred dollars later, her new phone buzzes to life. She has a missed call from Nic and an invitation from her mother to play Words With Friends on Facebook. Work emails set off little pings as they dive into her inbox, but she swipes it all aside in favor of the texting app.

She finds what she’s looking for. Strand’s since relocated to their usual haunt, the coffee shop, with the results of some video footage analysis. She makes her way there on agitated feet, disquiet snapping at her heels with every step.

###

He nearly chokes on his tea when he spies the daisy yellow blouse of the previous evening; today it desperately needs to befriend an iron. His hands unconsciously recall the feminine softness of the sheer fabric, the susurrus of trembling thrill that her body sang to him as he raised the shirt over her head.

“Hello,” he greets her with a neutral expression, and gestures toward a paper cup of coffee (milk and one sugar for Alex; he prefers it black on the rare occasions he partakes). She blinks and sits down abruptly, her notebook and recorder spilling out of her bag. He huffs out the phantom of a laugh and presses the record button, positioning the small device next to his open laptop.

“For this footage I retained the same multimedia analysis expert we usually do at the institute. The film quality is consistent with personal camcorders from around the time of the 2002 date stamp in the video. There’s no evidence of post-production tampering, which leaves us to investigate how the tape’s creators may have staged it. The dark spot in the background you believe to be a figure might also be attributed to poor lighting at the time of recording.”

He pauses and looks at her expectantly. When she remains silent, he speaks again with a hint of playfulness. “What, no questions for me? Surely I’ve not convinced you?”

She stops the recorder. “Am I in an episode of the Twilight Zone or something? Richard, what the hell?”

The grin disappears from his face. He supposes it’s a fair question, but he filed away the events of the previous evening as soon as he closed the hotel room door. It takes him some time to wander through the rows of bookshelves that make up the library of his mind. He finally locates a file folder bearing “Reagan, Alex, personal feelings related to” in the “Emotional Attachments” section. He’s surprised at folder’s thickness; initially, it was just a few pages noting general affection. Most of the files he’s kept on Alex are evenly split between “Apophenia, people suffering from” and “Colleagues, highly regarded.”

“I’m sorry, I was under the impression you wished to discuss this video, since we never had a chance to yesterday,” he tells her.

Alex flushes, the tinge of her cheeks a comely pastel pink. “Would you just stop waving away what happened? Doesn’t this, I don’t know, change things?”

“I should think a journalist of your caliber would not allow personal matters to color her reporting.” He clings onto the relative clarity of their professional relationship, trying to divert her from the perilous waters of whatever nebulous personal bond exists between them. That way lays complications they’d never be able to sort out, and he’s not sure he can endure the desertion of yet another woman in his life.

“Of course,” she says, jabbing the record button and switching gears immediately. “So how do you know the video’s staged? There’s no small percentage of chance that something else happened?”

“Well, there’s also the possibility of poor lighting, which I believe I pointed out to you in my initial assessment.” He pauses. “Listen, you’re so immersed in these so-called ‘black tapes’ cases that you’ve started expecting to see these dark figures. You’ve expressed your belief to me before—quite vigorously I might add—that all these cases are connected. You’re looking for something that’s not there, that’s never going to be there.”

“And we’re still talking about shadows?”

“Yes, of course.” Catching the frown on her face, he really _sees_ Alex for the first time in a while: Sheer exhaustion radiating off her in waves, concealer poorly masking the raccoon eyes of an insomniac. It stirs something in him, and he offers her an olive branch. “Look, do you see this window on the right of the screen?”

Curious as ever, she takes the bait. She pulls her chair closer and hunches over the table for a better view. Her elbow brushes his shoulder, a simple intimacy that shoots hot sparks down his arm.

“There’s a small porch light far to the left of that window that provides light from outside. We know from comparing the timestamp with recorded sunset times for 2002 that this video was filmed around dusk. When my team and I investigated this case initially, we visited this room. There’s another window on the opposite wall that lets in some natural light.”

“Okay, I’m with you so far,” she says. She’s so close to him.

“Well, it’s not so obvious in the video, but right outside the left of the frame, there’s a concave mirror hanging on the wall. That bookcase there would have cast a shadow that falls on the east wall at that time of the day. But accounting for the way the natural light and the porch light refracts off the mirror, and then how that light changes the bookcase’s shadow, it’s likely that caused an interesting lighting configuration to appear in the corner.”

“An ‘interesting lighting configuration’?”

“It’s nothing fantastical. Just physics.” He notices her incredulous expression and tries harder to charm his way back into her good graces. “Look, when presented with a simple, logical solution, why would you jump to an undocumented supernatural explanation? You’re really telling me you see demons in this video, in all the black tapes? You’re really going to spend the rest of your days on a ‘Demons for Dummies’ podcast?”

She laughs, she actually laughs. It wasn’t that great of a joke. She stops recording.

“I need to get home to change,” she sighs, waving a hand over her wrinkled clothing, and he snaps his laptop shut in agreement.

On their way out of the coffee shop, he breaks the companionable professionalism and rests a hand on the small of her back to guide her out the door. It’s just a small affection, really, but the places where his fingers touched her hum with warmth for long after they part ways.

Alex was right. Something’s changed.

###

After Strand flies back to Chicago, he tells her over text that his time will be mostly occupied the next few weeks. Here and there an email pops up on her computer, letting her know about further analysis on the video file or a contact he’s set up an interview with for her (when she talks to Strand’s multimedia specialist, he mentions offhand that she’s as charming as Strand described her).

One rare occasion two weeks into his absence, he even asks her over text how she is. Going for honestly, she sends him the poop emoji, and a thumbs-up for good measure. Riotous chortling fills her empty apartment as his baffled responses come through. She doesn’t bring up their most recent time together because Strand never does; he must think of it as a slip-up in an otherwise enjoyable work partnership. She’s probably a little too young and undereducated for him, and anyway he’s struggling with the baggage of twenty years away from the two most important women in his life.

When Strand finally finds his way back to Seattle, she schedules her week to monopolize his time. He arrives late into Sea-Tac on a Thursday, so she joins him in his hotel room to debrief on developments during his time away, and to go through material for a new black tape. The tension in their last meeting has dissipated, the rough edges of a rock smoothed over by tides and time.

Strand restrains his bluntness and approaches the conversation as a diplomat, and she finds herself missing his pure skepticism. Without it, the video footage (a little girl whose eyes go black and who seems to move a wardrobe with her mind) comes off as too real. The girl’s black-eyed smiling face is downright demonic. Alex shudders in discomfort, and Strand offers her an awkward pat on the back she assumes he meant to be soothing.

“Quite interesting, isn’t it?” he says after the video ends.

“If by interesting you mean _creepy as hell_ , then yes.” She catches the corners of Strand’s mouth twitch in amusement. “The girl’s like a demon.”

“Julie Sommers,” he corrects. “That’s what her parents thought too. The mother claimed every day she came from work, the furniture on the first floor of the house would be upside down. The father blamed his heart attack on her. After a teacher heard Julie talking about the rough ‘exorcisms’ her parents put her through, the state of Idaho took her into care.”

“What happened to her? Foster system?”

“She’s been housed in a psychiatric institution for four years, ever since the state gained custody.”

Her eyes shift from the laptop to Strand’s face, her tone suspicious. “Let me guess, the same one as Simon Reese?”

“I couldn’t confirm that without looking over my old case files,” he avoids, but she knows he’s dying to declare it a coincidence, scold her for seeing patterns where the dots don’t connect.

“Three River State, right?” she presses.

He pauses. “Yes.”

“You know, you’re always telling me about the importance of seeking the simplest logical answer in unexplainable situations. At some point, as all the coincidences pile up, doesn’t it make more sense that your black tapes are all connected?”

“Well, the Simon Reese case was something _you_ brought to _my_ attention, so it’s not really a black tape.”

“That’s a new way to not answer the question,” she snaps back, spitfire anger rising under the surface because she knows she’s _so close_ to the truth. “Why won’t you just tell me the truth, Richard?”

“Alex,” he warns, his voice low and cajoling. “It’s past midnight.”

“Fine, fine, we’ll continue tomorrow,” she agrees, and turns off the recorder. “You just love putting on the ‘man of mystery’ persona, don’t you?” She playfully jabs at his arm for emphasis. He catches her wrist before she makes contact, and suddenly she is very, very aware of his owlish stare, tentative blue eyes magnified through the thick lenses of his glasses. She feels like a sample trapped on a microscope slide.

“It’s late,” she remarks.

“Quite so,” he replies, and kisses her.

###

Waking up to Alex Reagan is like tasting just the slightest hint of his past life as Richard Strand the husband and father, someone who is loved, whose home is always full of sound, the musical lilt of Cora Lee’s voice as she tape-recorded thoughts for her thesis, Charlie’s grunge rock station blaring from her stereo. He runs his fingers absently through the ends of Alex’s hair, appreciating her ability to banish the loneliness.

It’s a struggle to leave the sanctuary of the bed, but he forces himself up so that when Alex awakens, he’s fully dressed and bearing coffee.

“Good morning.”

“Has anyone ever told you that early risers are objectively the most annoying kind of people?” she grumbles, taking the coffee discontentedly.

He grins wryly at her. “I’ve been called worse.” Then, with a tap on his watch: “You’ve got work. Nic called.”

“Thanks.”

She leaves, and the twin monsters of loneliness and insecurity rear their gnarled heads, whisking him out of the moment.

In the week that follows, he tries his best to maintain their professional rapport while keeping her at arm’s distance so that, when she leaves, he’ll be able to survive it. His fondness for her ekes out in little ways, though, quick touches on her arms or shoulders, unchecked flirtation that has Nic furrowing his brow every time he joins their conversations.

One day after errands at the university—he’s learned he might teach another graduate section—Strand meets her at the PNWS office. She grills him about his recent phone call with Julie Sommers and mercilessly taunts the return of his brutish skepticism until she’s satisfied.

“Are you hungry? I haven’t eaten yet.”

“I am,” she confirms, “but I have a standing date with some slow-cooker beef stew.” She smiles up at him, all 5 feet and 2 inches of her glowing. “You’re certainly welcome to be my third wheel.”

He knows it’s a bad idea, but he caves anyway, and her apartment embraces him with all the affection of a family. Her pillows smell overwhelmingly like home. The scent nearly brings him to tears, and in that moment, he draws the logical conclusion: Alex Reagan is going to destroy him.

###

Sometime after her third (of many) nights with Strand (really ‘Richard’ now, but old habits die hard), rage starts to sprouts from the seeds of her confusion. Strand plays hot and cold with her, the same as he always has. One week she’s eating a quiet homemade dinner in her apartment with him; the next he retreats to Chicago and barely sends her a ten-word email.

The weight of six weeks of secrecy slide off her shoulders as she finally discloses the truth to Nic.

“I’ve been… involved with Strand for a little while.”

Nic, ever the detective, is unsurprised. “I gathered as much. And Alex, I don’t mean to pry, but you really need to disclose your relationship with him. It’s a conflict of interest.”

“Ethically I know I’m a little gray but, I don’t know, it’s not _really_ anything.”

Her producer’s look of sad disapproval strikes her right in the pride. She’s committed a journalistic sin—the SPJ ethics code bars even the appearance of conflict of interest.

“Okay, point taken. I’ll talk to Strand,” she vows, terror seizing up her muscles. She feels like she’s taken a swan dive into a volcano.

She calls him that night, tension in her gut as tight as a rubber band about to snap.

“Hello?” His voice comes through her cell phone speaker deep and gruff, like how his stubble sometimes feels against her cheeks in the morning.

“Richard,” she breathes. “I’m not recording. I’m going to get straight to the point.”

“Okay.”

Her voice cracks. “What - what _is_ this?”

“This?” he asks, and she feels like she could smack him, if he were with her in Seattle. She wonders how much money she’d pay to fly to Chicago right now and deck him, crush his glasses in her fist.

“Us,” she responds.

She hears him sigh deeply, the sound reverberating in the speaker of her phone. There’s a sinking feeling, and she knows what he’s going to say.

“Alex, it’s not that I don’t enjoy spending time with you, it’s—”

“Cora Lee, right?” He makes a weak sound that breaks her. “You’re haunted by her, even after all this time?” She’s astonished at how much it hurts.

“Honestly, Alex, I need some time.”

The dial tone leaves her empty.

###

Two weeks of silence stretch on, and it stings, how much he misses her. He opens the messaging app on his phone but can’t think of anything to say. He scrolls through the conversation history, and stops somewhere in August.

“Whenever possible, substitute constructions out of known entities for inferences to unknown entities.”

He’s embarrassed for his past self, for sending philosophical concepts to Alex via text.

The Occam’s Razor theorem stays with him, lies next to him in his empty bed like a lover, follows him like the ghost of his wife. Eating lunch by himself, he welcomes its company, offers it coffee out of loneliness.

Alex is a know entity, it points out. Strand recalls the smell of her, the sweet scent of domesticity he links so strongly with home. Would that make Cora Lee an unknown entity now? He fears repeated history, the crushing weight of a woman who leaves. Has he connected the dots of Cora Lee and Charlie’s departures to Alex, assuming a pattern that simply isn’t there?

He borrows the razor from Occam and slashes at his fears until he’s just a lonely man splattered with vulnerability.

###

She’s got a laundry list of questions on the Julie Sommers black tape. She thinks she’s ready to put on a façade of professional detachment, so she has the recorder running already when he arrives. There’s a gloom that trails him like a thundercloud.

“Hello,” he says, and it’s dripping with unspoken implication. She can’t keep her mind on Julie Sommers. Her tragic flaw is her curiosity, her need to know the truth. She stops the recorder.

“I need to understand something,” she says. He tries to respond, but she speaks over him.

“You know, when you spend most of your time with someone, when you reveal all your secrets to that person, when you’ve been intimate with her”—here he coughs uncomfortably, and she’s delighted to make him _squirm_. “There’s some logical heuristic you once told me about, and I can’t remember exactly, but I think there was something about how ducks walk—”

He breathes out his characteristic half-laugh and laces his fingers through hers, binding them together.

“Alex, I’m an idiot.” She lets him kiss her, and when she resurfaces for air, he keeps his forehead resting on hers. “You’re right, you know,” he tells her, his eyes searching her own.

“Oh,” she responds lamely. He snorts.

She finally pulls the lid of the Pandora’s Box all the way open, and the soft glowing warmth of hope encircles her with its arms.

###

@AlexReaganRadio tweeted 4/6/16, 3:50pm:

@strandinstitute If it looks like a duck & it walks like a duck & it swims like a duck, I call that bird a duck #occamsrazor

@strandinstitute favorited this tweet 4/7/16, 6:07am


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